Connecticut Votes Tomorrow on Bill to Legalize Assisted Suicide

The Connecticut Public Health Committee may vote tomorrow on HB 6645, the mislabeled “Aid in Dying” bill that would make the state the next to legalize assisted suicide. If the bill does not receive a favorable vote tomorrow it will die in committee and save the state from joining Oregon and Washington as those allowing the practice.

The Family Institute of Connecticut is lobbying hard against the bill and provides LifeNews this update.

“We expect a “substitute language” bill making a few minor changes, but still legalizing Assisted Suicide in Connecticut, to appear on the agenda for a vote tomorrow. That is why we have to keep calling and emailing the Public Health Committee until the Assisted Suicide bill is dead,” it said.

The group has posted a YouTube video that makes more arguments against the bill. FIC adds:

The video features Stephen Mikochik, an attorney and professor and the former disability law expert for the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department, Lorraine Zuwallack, an RN with a specialty in hospice care, James McGaughey, executive director of the State’s Office of Protection and Advocacy for People with Disabilities and Cathy Ludlum, a founder of the disability rights group Second Thought-Connecticut.

No amendment will fix HB 6645 if it still an Assisted Suicide bill, particularly an amendment that makes Connecticut’s bill more like Oregon’s law. Though our opponents insist “there has not been a single case of misuse or abuse” of Oregon’s law, just this year in Oregon a woman pled guilty to “charges of criminal mistreatment and theft as a result of a state charge that she stole more than $50,000 after a man who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease moved into her home, named her his estate trustee, deeded his home to a trust and then died by physician-assisted suicide.” (See here and here.)